[ale] fstab question

Greg Freemyer greg.freemyer at gmail.com
Wed Nov 4 15:26:05 EST 2009


On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Jim Popovitch <jimpop at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 14:24, Sean <kilpatms at speakeasy.net> wrote:
>> Why not use /sda2, /sda3, and /sda4?
>
> Because some (probably lonely under-sexed pale-skinned
> mothers-basement-living) individual thought that all Debian/Ubnutu
> desktop systems should have all the same software configurations as
> powerful backend servers.  For presumably the same reasons you get
> Bluetooth, NetworkManager (with PPP, GSM, etc), Avahi, etc on your
> Debian/Ubuntu Server installs.
>
> -Jim P.

/dev/sda2, etc. quit being best practice a couple years ago for ALL
distros I believe.

Upgraded installs will keep their old /dev/sda2 style mounts, but new
installs will not.

The issue is that /dev/sda just means it was the first drive found
during the drive probing process.

In order to accelerate the boot process, disk drives are now probed
simultaneously so in some systems they change names on each reboot.

Also the modprobe order changes the /dev/sda names.  Boot from a live
CD could change the names.

Anyway, the distros finally acknowledged that /dev/sda names are
unreliable and starting using mount by label or mount by uuid as the
defaults.

grub even has some support this as well.  (It may take grub 2 to get support).

Greg
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